Joanne Mattera Art Blog

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3.21.2015

at the Cape Cod Museum of ArtI don't normally toot my own horn quite so insistently, but this has been an extraordinary 12 months for me--many good exhibitions, all curated by dealers and curators with exquisite sensibilities, in the company of many strong artists--that I've been posting walk-throughs of the shows (Territory of Abstraction, A Few Conversations About Color, Doppler Shift and more), sharing images of their work and mine. Allow me to do that again in this post, with a particular emhasis on my own paintings.

Partial panorama of the installation, with work by Emily Berger on the left, Mira Schor on the right, and Sarah Hinckley on either side of the doorway leading to the small gallery where my paintings are hung

There's a dedicated website for the show in lieu of a catalogue, so here let me just say that the painter Sarah Hinckley has curated an exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, up through May 31, which brings together six painters with a long-time connection to Cape Cod: Erica H. Adams, Emily Berger, Joanne Freeman, Hinckley, Mira Schor, and me. I invite you to spend some time on the Formal Aspects website. All the works in the exhibition are viewable, and each artist talks about her work and connection to the Cape.

In this post I'd like to bring you into the Ocean Edge Gallery, visible in the distance of the partial panorama above, and take you around the small, almost chapel-like space in which my work is installed. I'm not sure how I lucked out into that beautiful and serene little room, but I suspect I have Michael Giaquinto, curator of exhibitions to thank.

With the larger exhibition space to the left, we turn right to begin a clockwise tour of my work in the Ocean Edge Gallery. The paintings for this exhibition are all new, from 2014 and 2015.

Continuing past Silk Road 257, we come to a grid of 18 paintings from a series that is edging toward 300 paintings. It is a luxury to be able to show so many at one time, and a good part of my time in the studio was spent figuring out how I wanted them to be seen together

Here's the full installation (a closer view of which you can see here)

I have worked on this series for 10 years. When I started, it was the iridescence of taffeta and the texture of douppioni silk that inspired me, but over time the series has expanded into a broader formal exploration of color and texture

With our back to the grid, we look out into the main gallery, where paintings by Schor and Adams can be seen

Silk Road 190 with a view of Emily Berger's work in the main gallery. Closer view below

A more accurate rendering of the subtleties of hue and surface. Painting courtesy of Arden Gallery, Boston

Closer views from left, above, and right

And a closer view still to show you something of the luminosity of the layers and the way I limn the edges of each painting to charge each small color field. Silk Road 244, foreground, courtesy of Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown

In addition to acknowledging Sarah Hinckley, Michael Giaquinto, and my co-exhibitors, I'd like to thank Edith Tonelli, the museum's director, for her support, and extend a special note of appreciation to artist and museum volunteer Hugo Rizzoli for his precision installation of the 18 paintings. Finally a thank you to Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown; Arden Gallery, Boston; and Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, New York, for letting me take some of my work off their walls and out of their racks for this exhibition.

2.25.2015

to three inches" of snow last Saturday in Philadelphia's Old City, which had turned into a cold and inhospitable land of slushy white stuff. Fortunately Pentimenti Gallery was host to the warmer and much more inviting Territory of Abstraction.

Cold and snowy outside on North 2nd Street in Philly

Warm and chromatically inviting within

Pentimenti photo

Pentimenti's owner, Christine Pfister, has curated 12 artists into an exhibition that reflects a reductivist approach to geometry, color and pattern. "When put together, their work showcases the expansive nature of contemporary abstract art and the potential content of relatively simple forms," she says.

I'm one of the artists in the exhibition, so consider this post a walk-through with commentary. We start with the view above, which looks at the main gallery as you enter. Below and in subsequent photos I'll take you around, first the main gallery, then a peek into the Project Room--which has been put into use as an additional gallery space for the show--and then the side gallery. This exhibition is firing on all cylinders!

I love the way Pfister's selections allow us to experience the various "territories" so that they amplify and complement one another chromatically, geometrically, optically, materially, conceptually. Actually, I'm going to refer to her as Christine, which reflects the conversational tone of the opening and of the Q&A that took place, which you'll find when you scroll down past the installation shots. (As always, all photos are mine unless otherwise noted.)

We swing around past the desk at the far end of the gallery to see work by Gabriele Evertz on the back wall, and Mel Prest and Gracia Khouw on the right side of the main gallery wall.

To the right, in a narrower space you glimpse my five paintings hanging in a row in the distance, plus work by Hsaio, Gomez, Rob de Oude, and Khouw

Below: Here's a better view of paintings by Evertz, Prest and Khouw.

In the distance is the Project Room, pressed into service for the exhibition . . .

. . . where you see two works on paper by de Oude, a painting by Prest, and three framed constructions by Debra Ramsay

Closer view of Ramsay's work below

As we step back from the Project Room, our view is of Evertz to the left and me to the right

Stepping back farther, we have a view of the smaller side gallery with a painting and sculpture by Kevin Finklea on the left, the Evertz painting, the Project Room, my row of paintings, and the pieces by Hsaio and Gomez

Here's a better view of Finklea's work, reductive geometry in planar and dimensional form

Opposite Finklea's work are paintings from my Chromatic Geometry series, with Gomez in the distance

As we focus on the distance--which is actually the front of the gallery--we see Gomez, de Oude, and Khouw . . .

. . . whom you see in a closer view here

Also from the back of the gallery looking toward the front are paintings by Brent Hallard, foreground, Hsaio, Baris, Gomez and Diehl

Q&A With Christine Pfister

I've refrained from commenting on the work until now, because Christine invited me to have a Q&A session in the gallery with her as the visitors listened in. At the opening a group gathers around Christine Pfister and meShe had emailed me her questions ahead of time, which allows me to share my notes with you here. I don't remember most of the off-the-cuff remarks (you know how it is when you're speaking in front of a group and trying to concentrate while making it look as if the information is just flowing out). But I did begin by commenting that the history of this exhibition was well represented by two important people in the gallery: Mel Prest, who took a suitcase exhibition of a few artists throughout Europe in 2013, and Mary Birmingham, who recently curated an expanded version of Prest's concept as Doppler Shift at the Visual Art Center of New Jersey. (My walk through of that show, with more about its formation, is here.)Working with a smaller number of artists from the show, Christine focused in large measure on color and material, hewing to the reductive sensibilities of the artists she selected. Christine: Can you label the works in this exhibition as reductive? Post-minimalist? Abstract?

Joanne: Abstraction is our umbrella. Reductivism is for many of us
both the path and the objective. As a group we do not make fussy art, although it may be referential. If by “post-minimalism"
we understand that the aesthetic of the 1960s is being brought into a new century—a
new millennium—with a broader sense of what’s possible in reductive work, then yes, we’re post-minimalists.

Our reductive tendencies don’t adhere rigidly to industrial coolness or the
anonymity of manufacture of a previous generation. We engage color, material,
layers, process. Some of our work is quite sensuous.

Christine: What are the key characteristics you see in
this show?

Joanne: One thing I see is a strong optical element with the work of
Mel Prest, Gilbert Hsaio and Rob de Oude. Mel and Gilbert work referentially. Mel is drawing from physical impressions and patterns of
thought to create vertiginous fields. Gilbert uses geometry to create a
contemplative visual experience. Both make paintings that are disorienting in the
best possible way, because they allow us to fall into the work while allowing us the opportunity to step back and view the composition of a flat plane.

Mel Prest, Mirror
Cycle, 36 x 36 inches, acrylic on panel, 2014

Gilbert Hsaio, Boom, 10 x 10 inches, acrylic on wood, 2010

If Mel and Gilbert pull us in, Rob de Oude keeps us
teetering on the edge with his rigorous opticality. Multilayered grids formed by precisely painted lines, slightly shifted in each layer, offer entry into a complex network of shifting planes. Neither meditative not vertiginous, this work holds us in thrilling suspension—like standing at the edge of a cliff, poised to plunge but with feet still (barely) in contact with terra firma.

Rob de Oude, Dicey
Dissolve, 32 x 32 inches, oil on canvas, 2014

I’d extend the optical/spatial element to the work of Gabriele
Evertz, Brent Hallard, and Edgar Diehl. With a relative economy of means these
artists create works of surprising, even endless, depth. I’m looking, for
instance, at the stripe used by Gabriele Evertz. She takes a band of color, varies it
by width, value and intensity to create an undulating field of movement and light. Her sense of light is brilliant! This work is easel size, so it's as
if we're seeing but a small portion of a much larger continuum. (And, indeed, she has created fabulously large-scale work, noted here.)

I’m looking at Brent
Hallard’s division of a small field into four hues, which create a strong
architectural presence--all the more powerful for the way he pulls it off in small scale. Edgar Diehl employs a shaped aluminum substrate whose visual depth is amplified by closely aligned hues that seem to create their
own shadow.

I’m taken with the spatial and chromatic relationships
that my work shares with Brent Hallard’s. While he is consciously manipulating
the perception of space—or the ambiguity of space on a flat plane—I surprised
myself with the sense of figure/ground, or foreground/distance in my own
paintings. I’m a formalist. I was thinking strictly about the relationship of
color to shape, but in dividing the field horizontally—and I did that to
increase the color/shape possibilities--I created a de facto horizon line.

Minimalist purity is most strongly embodied by the work of Debra Ramsayand Kevin Finklea. Theirs is “simple” work until you see the complexity of their respective undertakings: Nothing is left to chance: the relation of a figure to its edge, of one edge to another, of the material selected to carry the line or form. Everything matters.

Debra affects the most extreme balance between concept and material,
employing mathematical logic as a guide, and choosing specific materials for the way they suggest light, line or form.

Debra amplified my ideas with this comment: "I was
touched by Christine’s sharing of the collector’s comment about my work
capturing air. I love the simplicity in this thought. I am interested in making
work that uses a material in its most unadulterated form and having my hand
intercede in the slightest way possible to effect a change. In the Two Equal
Lovers series I am relying on light and shadow to play on the cut and folded
surface of the Dura-Lar. Dura-Lar is an archival, paper-like material that
consists of polyester resin. It is my hope that when the viewer reacts
with my work, the spareness of it allows room for contemplation, that it might
give back to the viewer something they knew but perhaps have forgotten."

Kevin allows chance into the process. I love what he says in an online
interview with Brent Hallard: “We can and must allow moments of understanding
to enter into our studio practice. I don’t believe interesting work is the
result of purely rational processes. There has to be both the haptic and the
haphazard entering into the work.”

I’d also like to comment on the conceptual pairing of Enrico Gomez and Gracia Khouw. Both artists
draw from the geometry of written language. What I've learned from reading
about Enrico's work is that he draws from a diversity of his sources, both political
and cultural: calligraphy; sacred texts; Latino and Queer culture; as well as the
headlines in our newspapers. But I’m struck by the way he transcends his
source material to create geometric abstractions that hint at a meaning just
beyond our comprehension.

Christine: How do you evaluate the works on view today in terms of what
is happening here in the United States and outside?

Joanne: Ispend a week in Miami during the art fairs in December and see a world’s worth of art in
a relatively short time. Everything is
on exhibition—big and small; painting and sculpture, representational and non objective; abstraction of
every sort. Materiality is much in evidence: wood, wax, glue, fabric, foam,
stuff of all kinds. Not all of the work is particularly well made, and as I look at
it, I find myself wondering if its casual construction is truly intentional of
if the artist just didn’t know how to put it together. There often seems to be
a lot in the way of Not Ready for Prime Time players on exhibition at those fairs. Of course there’s also
some wonderful work—well conceived, supremely well made, with a maturity of
thought and construction that comes from years of studio practice.

And that’s what I see in this exhibition: a deep and passionate engagement with
ideas and materials, developed by longtime artists with a mature sensibility informed by commitment and experience.

Postscript: As often happens when trying to squeeze a lot of information into a short presentation, my comments about Steven Baris's work remained unsaid. (Apologies, S.B.!) One of the great things about the reprise of my comments here in written form is that I get to include what I'd unintentionally omitted.

In his large and small canvases, Steven is employing forms taken from observation--in this instance, the big-box stores and distribution centers that cluster in the industrial parks of exurbia. He shows them orthographically or from overhead, distorting them compositionally. Clearly his work shares spatial concerns with so many of the artists in the exhibition. As an aside, I'd note that he handles yellow green like no one else. If this were Renaissance Siena, he'd be known as the Master of Chartreuse.

Steven Baris, Drift E2,
48 x 48 inches, oil on canvas, 2015

Territory of Abstraction is at Pentimenti Gallery through April 4. There will be two First Friday events: March 6 and April 3, when Old City galleries open their doors in the evening.

1.27.2015

.In early November Doris Mukabaa Marksohn, owner of dm contemporary in Manhattan, invited me to curate an exhibition. I'd been wanting to put together a color show and even had a mental selection of the work of artists whose studios I'd visited and could see together.

"When would the show be for?" I asked, thinking spring or summer.
"Mid-January to the end of February," she said.
I took a deep breath and said yes.

Talking color at dm contemporary

In A Few Conversations About Color we see what happens when seven colorists allow their work to take part in a visual discourse. In curating the exhibition I brought together these artists (myself among them) who work formally in a reductive or geometric mode and who collectively employ a range of mediums to express their chromatic strategies. Within those parameters, we explore structure and gesture,
working in a way that is physically vigorous or conceptually driven, materially
rich or coolly uninflected. There’s no black or white here, in fact or in concept, as the
fabric of this exhibition is one of chromatic interaction.

You can view an online version of the catalog here, designed by Ruth Hiller with my essay, images of the artists' work, and their own words about their work. In this post, let me take you on a virtual tour of the exhibition, in the beautifully illuminated gallery space, interspersed with some artist-provided images of work in the show. The artists are Joanne Freeman, Ruth Hiller, Damien Hoar de Galvan, Julie Karabenick, Matthew Langley, Joanne Mattera and Nancy Natale.The exhibition is on through February 28, with hours and info here.

We're standing in the hallway, entrance door just past our left shoulder, looking into the gallery's two main exhibition rooms. (There's another gallery to our right, and we'll get to that later)

Walking into the large central gallery: Joanne Freeman at left; Julie Karabenick

Joanne Freeman, Roxbury (A) and Roxbury (B), both 2013, oil on canvas

Looking from the central gallery into a segmented adjacent space with work by Matthew Langley, center, and Julie Karabenick on far wall

Julie Karabenick

Above: #13, 2013, 2013, acrylic on panel

Below: #12, 2013, 2013, acrylic on panel

Below: Panning left into the alcove to see work by Ruth Hiller

Full view of the alcove, with paintings by Matthew Langley and Hiller

I am taken not only with the chromatic conversation between these two artists, but by the repartee provided by the vertical divides in their work

Matthew Langley

Above: Bright Earth, 2014, oil on canvas

Below: Red Sails, 2014 oil on canvas

Ruth Hiller, intersection 11.4, 2014, pigmented beeswax on panels

Across from the installation of Langley and Hiller's work is a pedestal with three small sculptures by Damien Hoar de Galvan, each Untitled, from 2013 or 2014, made scrap wood and various paint. The compositions of colored shards converses with Karabenick's pristine compositions . . .

. . .as well as with the elegantly rough-hewn constructions of Nancy Natale, whose three works are on the wall to the right of the pedestal

Nancy Natale, Paris Passion, 2013, mixed media

Are you oriented?

Now let's head back through the center gallery and over to a third gallery to the right of where we entered

PROJECTS

Just published!

“Silk Road: Excerpts From an Ongoing Series” has been published to mark 10 years of my involvement with one series, whose aesthetic I describe as “lush minimalism.” You can view the 56-page book in its entirety online at no charge. Click pic to view. The book is also available for purchase

Through April 4

"Territory of Abstraction," a 12-artist show at Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, reflects a reductivist approach to geometry, color and pattern. Click pic for a walk-through of the show. Above: work by Gabriele Evertz, Debra Ramsay, and me. Additonal info: www.pentimenti.com

Through May 31

"Formal Aspects: Visual Dialogue in Structure" is a six-artist exhibition at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, up now. Curated by artist Sarah Hinckley, it includes Erica H. Adams, Emily Berger, Joanne Freeman, Hinckley, Mira Schor and myself. Click pic for the exhibition blog, which contains info about the show and each artist, as well as installation shots and links to the museum. Above, an installation of my work with Hinckley's painting in the foreground

James Panero Reviews Doppler Shift

Writing in The New Criterion, Panero calls Doppler Shift "a smart group show, " noting the work of "artists who interest me most these days." There's a nice shout out to Mary Birmingham, the curator; to Mel Prest, who originated the concept; and to me, among others. Click pic for the review

Up now at Adler & Co. Gallery

An ever-changing installation of paintings from my "Silk Road" series is up now at Adler & Co. Gallery, 77 Geary Street, San Francisco

For a Walk-Through of Summer Invitational . . .

.

If you enjoyed my Miami reporting, Fair and Loathing, please consider supporting this blog with a donation of $20 (more, less as you can afford). This huge job, which brings a good chunk of (expensive) Miami to you, takes almost a month out of my studio practice. A Pay Pal link is below. Many thanks.

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In the Studio

After a few false starts with the title, this series of 25 graphite-on-paper drawing is officially "Diamond Lattice." This is is #22, 2012, with micaceous pigment and cold wax, 30 x 22 inches. Click pic to see more work from the series

Recent: Buddy of Work

Henry Samelson asks artists to show two images: their primary work and a peripheral or related project. The connections are interesting. My own "buddies" are posted now. Click pic to link

"Textility," curated by Mary Birmingham and myself for the Visual Art Center of New Jersey, Summit (where Birmingham is the chief curator), looked at contemporary painting, sculpture and work on paper in which textile elements were referenced or employed. The exhibition is over, but you can see this exhibition on line. Click on the links below to read and see more.

Boston Globe Style Watch

November 13, 2011: Four of my small paintings are in this Cambridge apartment, which was the subject of a Style Watch feature. Click the pic to enlarge the image and read the story. Thanks to Arden Gallery, Boston, for representing me in Massachusetts (and beyond)

All texts and photography are by me unless otherwise noted. If you wish to excerpt a small portion of a post, you are free to do so under the Creative Commonsnon-commercial copyright--i.e. you must credit me as the author/photographer, and you must provide a link to my blog. Thanks.

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About Me

THE FIRST CONTEMPORARY BOOK ON ENCAUSTIC PAINTING. AND STILL THE BEST

My book, The Art of Encaustic Painting, was published by Watson-Guptill in 2001. It's the first commercially published book on contemporary encaustic. There are three sections: history, with images of the famed Greco-Egyptian Fayum portraits; a gallery of contemporary painting and sculpture (including the work of Jasper Johns, Kay WalkingStick, Heather Hutchison, Johannes Girardoni and myself), and technical information, including an interview with Michael Duffy, a conservator at the Museum of Modern Art.